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"Inferior planet" refers to Mercury and Venus, which are closer to the Sun than Earth is. "Superior planet" refers to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (the latter two added later), which are further from the Sun than Earth is. The terms are sometimes used more generally; for example, Earth is an inferior planet relative to Mars.
Seen from a superior planet, an inferior planet on the opposite side of the Sun is in superior conjunction with the Sun. An inferior conjunction occurs when the two planets align on the same side of the Sun. At inferior conjunction, the superior planet is "in opposition" to the Sun as seen from the inferior planet (see the diagram).
Superior planets: Planets whose orbits lie outside the orbit of Earth. [nb 1] Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune: Trojan planet: A planet co-orbiting with another planet. The discovery of a pair of co-orbital exoplanets has been reported, but later retracted. [3] One possibility for the habitable zone is a trojan planet of a gas giant close to ...
The planet, called LHS 3154 b, orbits at about 2.3% of Earth's orbital distance from the sun, circling its star every 3.7 days. It is much closer even than our solar system's innermost planet ...
The name originated from the fact that these planets orbit closer to the Sun than the Earth and hence, in the geocentric cosmology of Ptolemy, both appear to travel with the Sun across the sky. This is in contrast to the so-called superior planets, such as Mars, which appear to move independently of the Sun. infrared astronomy
Areocentric orbit (named after Ares): An orbit around the planet Mars, such as that of its moons or artificial satellites. For orbits centered about planets other than Earth and Mars and for the dwarf planet Pluto, the orbit names incorporating Greek terminology are not as established and much less commonly used:
The superior planets, orbiting outside the Earth's orbit, do not exhibit a full range of phases since their maximum phase angles are smaller than 90°. Mars often appears significantly gibbous, it has a maximum phase angle of 45°. Jupiter has a maximum phase angle of 11.1° and Saturn of 6°, [1] so their phases are almost always full.
Thus, the Sun occupies 0.00001% (1 part in 10 7) of the volume of a sphere with a radius the size of Earth's orbit, whereas Earth's volume is roughly 1 millionth (10 −6) that of the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 5.2 AU from the Sun and has a radius of 71,000 km (0.00047 AU; 44,000 mi), whereas the most distant planet, Neptune, is 30 AU ...